The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Use Your Buy-Side Muscle to Punish Sell-Side Behavior You Dislike

When you own both sides of a market, you can turn a policy fight into a purchasing decision.

The more I think about it I agree this is purely a sell side discussion. Buy side will continue to path we laid out in the past to deal with multiple calls and non clean auctions. While it's legitimate for pubs to use different floors for different SSPs and maybe there are some cases where the benefit outweigh the cost, it doesn't mean we need to entertain this. I am willing to lose access and pick a war on this one.

We could implement the feature where AdX get to compete against the winner even if our floor wasn't met, thus increasing our and the publisher revenue but this will be essentially endorsing a bad policy and also removing one of the obvious negative consequences. I rather keep that one in the back pocket as plan B.

As I said we should revisit the single call position on Adx and then focus on plan A, i.e. refuse to buy if there are multiple calls and floors aren't the same. Doing it in Jedi is easy where in HB it's nearly impossible to enforce, however DBM has access to some of the data and I'd like to believe we can design Poirot like mechanisms to detect Pubs who do something like that and stop buying (GDN+DBM) on them.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Doc. 1200-26, filed 2024-08-22
July 21, 2017
Public domain
View the primary source →